Went to Amsterdam on Friday with Robin to look for maple syrup and at some random design stuff. We went to the Van Gogh museum, walked around the markets, and visited some design shops like droog and Frozen Fountain.

I also got a Dutch comic book from Lambiek, that is according to their website, the oldest comic book shop in Europe. It has a female protagonist, and a dinosaur on the cover. Translated, it’s “Isabelle and the Monster.” We’ll see if it’s any good motivation for me to learn to read Dutch. The cover of another book of the series was pretty good, “De waanzinnige geleerde,” but I kind of wish I knew what was going on.

comic book I got from Lambiek

Okay, now that I translated it, it kind of makes sense. But I didn't have Google Translate in the store.

We went to Dutch Design Week (yes, part 2 for me) and also to Amsterdam for Sungyon’s birthday. (Many thanks to Marlous for letting us crash at her place.)

Design Week was less interesting this time than I thought it would be. I may have needed to know more about the things that were there, but it wasn’t as inspiring as I had hoped… There are some photos up on Flickr anyway. Speaking of which, it only shows 200 of my photos at a time, so until I get suckered into paying, seeing some of my older photos may not work.

And since I think my most loyal reader of my blog is Mom (hi Mom!), I’m linking to the slideshow so it’ll be easier for her to look at everything.

I went today to visit Marlous and her boyfriend Jur in Amsterdam. Since I was out rather late last night in Den Haag (a mediocrely long story), I ended up not having much time to do much… I had some tea and tried an anise-flavored cookie that they eat during the December holiday Sinterklaas, something kind of funny and to note of later.

We took the scenic route through town to see Anne Frank’s house, where she and her family hid for two years before being ratted out. It was quite interesting, just kind of depressing. I saw a glimpse of Chinatown (or Chinashanty?), and found the Red Light District to be smaller than I thought it would be, and the prostitutes in the windows even less noteworthy.

Then we went back and Jur cooked us yummy salmon risotto and green beans. I also saw some Dutch TV, which was… kind of interesting. Jur says they call it “cucumber news” because it’s the time of year where nothing that interesting happens and news programs could comment on cucumbers. They also had this weird gameshow where people made their own vehicles to do certain tasks, akin to those crazy Japanese gameshows.

Marlous is working on her presentation to come in a week, which I will attend. Best of luck to her. Classes also finally start tomorrow, with handdrawing at 8:30. Woohoo!